RarestBlog

Short version: If you are user - hail Cuil ! If you are developer/designer/any kind of creative person - possibly fear Cuil !

As you might already know - there’s a new sheriff in town. Well, not quite the sheriff, but rather the bunch of ex-Google guys (or so they say) that have built a new (not quite new) search engine - Cuil (at the moment of writing - unavailble, guess from the load).

Actually I like this engine. Mostly due to the fact that it matches in traffic numbers today to Google - i.e. the number of people came to TheRarestWords from Google at the moment is EQUAL to Cuil’s people. And if TheRarestWords were making money - today I would have been enjoying double profits I guess this is only temporary as today everybody is talking about them, anyway. Tomorrow we’re going to see much less traffic than today from them.

But with this great opportunity - there’s also a big evil in Cuil.

What worries me is the amount of text they show on the search page. It’s becoming much and much more of a nuisance that search companies think it’s okay to massively copy parts of your site and display them. Look at searchme.com, particularly at this page about one of the greatest people in history. Do you even need to visit those pages? No, because you can read it all right in SearchMe. But that means - no more advertising profits for sites they display, lost profits mean web owners would be less encouraged to create more content for the sites, because now they’re creating content for SearchMe (I’m deliberately avoiding linking to that site). And isn’t this site a one big obvoius web-scale copyright infrigement?

Okay, but they seem to have some law in their hands, since nobody sued them yet. And my sites don’t generate any kind of measurable profit, so even if I lose something due to SearchMe - it’s going to be less than a cent per month I guess. But some of you lose profits.

Okay, back to Cuil. The example SearchMe is setting for next-gen search engines is really bad. If every engine would start copying all other sites content…. And Cuil is showing much more of contiguous text from web page, I think in many cases it wouldn’t even be necessary to visit the page to get the info. And that’s a problem.

Some say that Internet advertising comes to an end, because it has artificially inflated prices (due to the fact that Google and others set MINIMUM price for keyword and the fact that you sometimes can buy a word from Google and sell it other serach engine for even bigger price, which means that it’s even more inflated [it was called AdWords Arbitrage, it's not really longer possible due to the fact that Google RAISED their minimum prices for many keywords even more a year or so back]); some say copyright laws are going to change due to the Internet being a very big copy machine and that you can’t really protect copy rights anymore of anything that CAN be copied (webpages being the example), but rather you can only protect scarce (I’m not sure that it’s a right word) things, like reputation, integrity, etc… the point is that last argument is pretty much a “doomsday proclamation” for creators.. but I don’t believe in doomsdays. There were too many flopped ones in past to be afraid of those predictions.

The problem is that last argument is really becoming more and more of a reality. No longer the Torrents are problem for Music Industry or Film Industry. But rather now we’re are witnessing an beginning of an era where more and more of our work is copied everyday. And it seems to be legal (nobody closed SearchMe yet, which does that massively, I can only block their bot, which I do). The problem is that this kind of engines (competing who would show bigger snippet of my text) become reality RIGHT NOW. And it’s kind of Torrents for websites.

See Technorati.com - another example of full post copying. Legal? Take this page for example. It’s nearly a full copy of my post. And Technorati enjoys much bigger PageRank and whateverelserank there is. That means they COULD get my post indexed FASTER than me. Think they have noindex for those pages, so that it’s not massive copyright infrigement, but rather a service for users? Think again! 1 000 000 INDEXED BY GOOGLE infriged blogs in .com domain only. If you blog - you are probably there too. I think WordPress even pings service which tips off technorati that there’s new content on your blog.

Do you think that doesn’t affect you? Think again! Do you know how many searches from Google/Yahoo for your text lands on Technorati instead, because they had your text indexed BEFORE Google indexed post on your site? Does Google really know that you are the originator of this “duplicate content” or possibly they’ll think Technorati is, since text was there first (at least for Google who indexes millions of Technorati pages a day vs. your mom-and-dad blog being indexed once a day or even a week?)?

The problem being is if that’s my new reality - I need to evolve from thinking of my material as copyrighted and that nobody would copy it without at least facing a moral dilemma (I can’t sue US people since I’m in Russia).

So let me be a doomsday crier too. The only way now to evolve is to think of our content as unprotected and somehow use something like Creative Commons model for our good. I.e. assume that your content will be copied and used somewhere. But how could you earn a least something as a reward for all the trouble you went through to create something if we assume it’s going to be copied?

That’s the question each of us need to think through.

Well, some music groups found business models that work. But I doubt any of you are going to buy a $30 copy of my article in a beatiful box if you could read it for free on the Internet
The problem is that blogs/sites rarely have real fans who want to support them with money. I’ve read about one experiment in software where a guy tried everything he could to make people “buy him a beer” in exchange for his freeware. He had 50 000 downloads and barely broke $50 mark. 50 000! Dammit that’s a population of a city I live in and all of them paid just 50$!? That’s not the way to go.

We need to think ahead people. We need to think.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 10:52 pm and is filed under site.